Francine M Foss MD

Biographical Info

Dr. Francine Foss, professor of medicine in the Section of Medical Oncology at the Yale Cancer Center, is an internationally recognized clinician and clinical researcher with expertise in adult lymphomas and in stem cell allotransplantation. She has derived and tested therapies that have been used to treat thousands of cancer patients, and her recent research has potential to substantially impact the field of stem cell research, benefiting patients at Yale and around the world. Foss has brought a nationally established clinical trials program to the Yale Cancer Center. In her previous post at Tufts New England Medical Center in Boston, she designed, initiated and directed multi-center national clinical trials of two pharmacologic agents for lymphoma, which have subsequently received FDA approval and are widely used treatments. One of these, Interleukin-2 conjugated to Diphtheria toxin, was the first FDA-approved fusion biologic drug to be approved for use in the United States. She also developed a treatment for patients undergoing allogeneic stem cell transplant that reduced the development of graft-versus-host disease from 40%-50% to only 15%. These findings led to the initiation of two National Cancer Institute-sponsored trials to confirm these results in patients with lymphoma and myelodysplastic syndrome.

Dr Foss is also a world expert in T cell Lymphomas. She has pioneered several novel therapies for T cell lymphomas and has led national studies. She has been a translational researcher in T cell Lymphomas and currently is collaborating with a number of laboratories to identify molecular targets in T cell Lymphoma.